Earlier this week, a new client wrote this to me:
“Between the world’s uncertainty and how long I’ve felt trapped in this cycle of knowing I want a different career but not taking action, I feel pretty disconsolate. I find myself asking, ‘what’s even the point?’”
I need to reconnect with a sense of hope and purpose.”
I wrote this love letter for my client. If you’ve been feeling despair lately, it’s for you, too.
Here are four steps for when you feel like hope is gone:
One: Map the gap.
Imagine you’re holding a rubber band.
Hook one end of the imaginary rubber band around your right forefinger. That finger represents the life you long for.
Hook the other end around your right thumb, with your palm facing away from you. Your thumb represents your current reality.
Pull the imaginary rubber band between your forefinger and thumb.
The gap between your two fingers represents the distance between where you are and where you want to be.
There are many names for this gap and the tension we feel in it—Peter Senge calls it creative tension, Parker Palmer calls it the tragic gap, and many facilitators call it the groan zone.[1]
You’re not alone. Most of us find this place very uncomfortable.
Two: Notice your inner Monitor.
In their brilliant book, Burnout, twin sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski name a part of ourselves they call the Monitor:
The Monitor is the brain mechanism that manages the gap between where we are and where we are going…
Technically, it’s called the ‘discrepancy-reducing/-increasing feedback loop’ and ‘criterion velocity,’ but people fall asleep immediately when we say that, so we just call it the Monitor…
The Monitor knows:
- what your goal is;
- how much effort you’re investing in that goal; and
- how much progress you’re making.
It keeps a running tally of your effort-to-progress ratio, and it has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be.[2]
When my inner Monitor judges that I’m too far away from my goals, it yells:
- You should be done already!
- It’s taking you far too long.
- What if you never make it and are wasting all this time?
- If you weren’t such a (fill in the blank), you’d be done by now.
- What’s wrong with you?
What does your inner Monitor say?
Three: Notice how the stories of powerlessness and worthlessness feel in your body.
Now, pick up a second rubber band in your imagination. You’re still holding the rubber band between your right forefinger and thumb.
Now, wrap this new band around your right thumb, representing your current reality, and attach the other end to your left index finger.
Your left index finger represents all of the stories—assumptions, beliefs, judgments, etcetera—that hold you back from reaching your goal, including what your Monitor tells you.
Pull the imaginary rubber band back with your left forefinger. Feel how much more energy it takes now to move your thumb toward your vision when your limiting stories hold it back.
Limiting stories—like the gap between where I am now and where I want to be means there’s something wrong with me—exhaust and overwhelm us, making it much harder to reach toward what we long for.
Now let go of the second rubber band. Notice how much easier it becomes to move forward.
Four: Acknowledge your grief.
When I turn toward my inner Monitor with warmth and kindness and ask what it wants me to know, I usually discover that it feels sad.
Of course, we feel sad that we aren’t yet where we want to be, and our hearts ache when we face the realities of this world.
And, it makes sense to want to avoid our pain or to wallow in it. But despair can set in when we don’t tend to our grief well.
Rather than avoiding our pain or wallowing in it, to acknowledge grief skillfully, we must turn toward grief, witnessing it as if it were a small child or beloved friend, as if we were sitting beside a lake of sadness, but not entirely diving in.
When we hold our sadness with care, our protective walls can soften, and glimmers of possibility can shine through the cracks.
Five: Name what matters so much that you will keep showing up for it, even if there’s no good outcome.
I honestly don’t think a lot about hope. I do think a lot about love. I don’t do my work because I have hope. I do it because I have love.
As my dear friend and political wife, Rachel, recently told me, “I don’t know a lot. But I do know that we know how to love each other. They don’t. That means that no matter what happens, we’ve won. You’ve taught me that.”
Ask yourself: What am I willing to stand for, even though there are no guarantees and the odds may not even be in my favor?
Write down what arises. You might even boil this down into a few simple words—your core values.
If you can’t find hope, stop trying. Instead, commit to taking baby steps that align with what matters most to you.
If you have any questions or thoughts about this, please feel free to email me.
More than anything—even more than reaching that big goal—I wish you a life that honors what matters most to you.
In love and solidarity,
[1] I first learned this rubber band model from Peter Senge’s 2006 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. He calls this the creative tension model.
[2] Amelia and Emily Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. New York, NY: Random House, 2020.